Aaron Betzky is a critic, curator, educator, lecturer, and writer on architecture and design. He has been appointed by the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation as the new leader of Frank Lloyd Wright’s School of Architecture, Taleisin. Previously, he was the director of the Cincinnati Art Museum for eight years. From 2001 to 2006 he served as director of the Netherlands Architecture Institute in Rotterdam, Netherlands. He is currently director of the Shenzhen B-City Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture in Shenzhen, China.
Aaron Betzky received a Master of Architecture from Yale School of Architecture and studied under Gerhard Kallmann, Frank Gehry, and Helmut Jahn. He received a B.A., cum laude, with a major in History, the Arts and Letters, from Yale College.
Betsky has taught at the University of Cincinnati and the University of Kentucky; He was Eero Saarinen Chair at Taubman School of Architeture and Urban Design in 2006. Betsky has been a member of the Urban Council in Skolkovo, Russia since 2010.
Aaron Betzky is widely published. Currently he is a contributing editor at Architect Magazine; he wrote a weekly column on architecture for The Los Angeles Times in the 90s. His articles have appeared in Art in America, Artforum, Bouw, Domus and many other highly respected publications. His latest book, What is Modernism (Actar) is forthcoming this spring. Previous, most recent books, include: At Home in a World of Sprawl: Collected Essays (RMIT Press, 2012); The United Nations Building (Thames & Hudson, 2005); False Flat: Recent Dutch Design (Phaidon Press, 2004).
Says Betsky of his Syracuse lecture,”We already have enough buildings. Our cities are abstractions turned into objects that imprison us. What we need are designs that make better use of what we already have. We need to rethink, reuse, and re-conceptualize our human-made environment. In the context of Reliving the City: the 2015 Shenzhen Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism, this lecture will survey the work of those designers who are hunting and gathering together a better world.”
